Nokia N97 – An Expensive Multimedia Beast
Sum and Substance:
Thumbs Up:
Huge screen, plenty of storage space, great camera and music quality,
Thumbs Down:
Symbian OS is bit of letdown on a touch screen phone like this, touch screen is resistive and not capacitive,
Inside the Trunk:
Technology: WCDMA (UMTS) / GSM
Band: WCDMA (UMTS) / GSM 850/900/1800/1900
Phone design: Slider
Caller ID: Yes
Other features: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, Camera, Music player.
The Whiz Kid Speaks:
The display of Nokia N97 is 3.5 inch big, has 16.7 million colors, and gives a resolution of 640X360 pixels.
Supported audio formats are WMA, MP3 and AAC. Supported video formats are MPEG-4 and H.264. Downloadable content on the N97 includes screensavers, video files, audio files, wallpapers, ring tones, themes, games. The phone runs on Symbian OS. The N97 is 5 MP camera which can take video shooting as well. Resolution for video capture is 640X480 (VGA)
The N97 has 32 GB internal memory further expandable to 47 GB. Connectors on the phone include 3.5 mm phone jack, micro USB, Audio/Video out. 1500 mAH lithium ion battery gives talk time of 400 minutes and standby time of about 430 hours.
Razzle Dazzle:
N97 has to be the sexiest of all Nokia phones. It has the iPhone like look with a few buttons on the surface and rest all is controlled through touch screen. Once you put the phone in our hands you will notice that the build quality is not as good as Nokia E series and the battery cover is a bit flimsy. The phone is a bit tall however it is completely justified with the whole lot of features cramped in to it. The handset is 2.1 inches wide, 4.6 inches tall, 0.6 inches thick and weighs about 5.29 ounces.
Inside Dope:
Nokia has finally added a touch screen device to its N series line up. We often wondered why Nokia was shy of making touch screen devices, everyone is using it and it is much more convenient as compared to physical buttons. Above all, it looks sexy. We were dying to get our hands on the Nokia N97 with all the hype surrounding it and so we pounced on it as soon as it entered our test centers.
The display of the screen is 3.5 inches big, supports 16.7 million colors and gives a resolution of 640X360 pixels. We were disappointed to see that the phone has a resistive and not a capacitive touch screen. Capacitive touch screens are easier to use because they don’t need a stylus. The screen is certainly not as sharp when compared to what competitors like HTC Touch Diamond2 has. The screen also doesn’t support multi touch, something that the iPhone is popular for. Multi touch interface is great for ‘pinching’ photos while zooming in and out. The huge screen has a built in accelerometer unfortunately it lags a bit during transition. The phone has proximity sensor which locks the phone from accidental touches when you place it close to your ear.
We expected scrolling on this handset to be the most comfortable experience since it has a huge screen. However, it turned out to be miserable because when we flicked through the pages the movements were short and jerky. We don’t understand why the phone needs a single tap for menu but double tap for all other features.
N97 has Samsung’s TouchWiz like interface for the home screen; it places widgets on the display for the applications that you need the most. These applications can be accessed with a single tap on the icons.
The menu of the phone can be accessed by pressing the button in between the talk and the end keys. The menu system is user friendly and if you are a veteran Nokia user you will need little time to get used to it. However the menu is spoilt by the lamentable touch screen interface.
The display of the phone slides up and tilts on one side, to reveal a full QWERTY keyboard. We really liked the way the screen tilted on one end; the placement is great if you are watching videos or movies on the handset. The keyboard is one of the best we have ever seen in smart phones because it is roomy and the buttons are well placed away from each other to avoid mishits. Our only complaint was the placement of the space bar and shift key on the far right side which makes it difficult to type. There is a virtual keypad on the phone too; it is just numeric keypad instead of full QWERTY board.
Nokia N series phones are music centered phone and hence are known to have a 3.5 mm phone jack on it. This phone too has one on the sides and along with it, there is a power button, micro USB port, stereo speakers and lock switch. The volume rocker on the sides of the phone can also be used for zooming in and out of web pages.
For storing music, videos and photos Nokia gives you an amazing 32 GB of internal memory which can be further expanded to 47 GB using a memory card. For messaging the phone has IMAP, POP3 and SMTP accounts and it is accompanied by an attachment viewer.
N97 has the same 5 MP camera that we saw in N95 and N96. The camera comes with Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar lens with dual-LED flash, 4x digital zoom and auto focus. There are lots of advanced options like light sensitivity, color tone, geotagging and exposure. The camera can record videos at resolution of 640×480 (VGA) at 30 frames per second. Picture and video quality was amazing on the N97, in fact one of the best we have ever seen.
Music centered N97 device recognizes music formats of eAAC+, AAC+, AAC, WMA and MP3. The music library will categorize your music by composers, genres, albums and artists. Other than that the video player supports MPEG-4 and 3GPP files. Video and photo quality is simply amazing on the N97. The handset also has FM which you can listen to using the bundled headset.
We certainly didn’t like the Symbian OS that the phone comes shipped in. It is not made for touch screen device and should be limited for other Nokia devices which have physical buttons. The OS has a lot to cover if it is to compete with operating envirionments like iPhone OS 3.0, Google Android, Palm WebOS, etc.
The phone also has GPS, we used it to find a location and was pretty fast. The phone was finally tested for call quality and it came out with flying colors. We could hear what our friends were saying and they could hear our voices too. Call quality again one of the best we have seen in smart phones. Speaker phone quality was a bit disappointing because we had to hold the phone close to the ears as the volume was not loud enough. Audio was cut occasionally and our friends told us that we sounded soft. Pairing the device with Bluetooth was smooth and fast however that depends on the headset you are using.
The phone has a rated talk time of 95 hours and standby time of about 17.9 days.
Nitty Gritty:
Firstly, the Nokia N97 is unlocked which means it is costly. The device doesn’t tie you up with a carrier but puts you back by $700. Secondly all these features are offered in phones like iPhone and Palm Pre (iPhone has better features, actually) so why would you spend so much on this phone? We would recommend you not to purchase this phone and look elsewhere for alternatives.
